CHAPTER X.

Death of the Eternal Son—-Scriptural Passages proving@ it—-His Exaltation—-What was meant by his Death—-Not mrnere Physical Death—-Why his Sufferings called Death—-Visible Expiration on Cross, but Representative of his viewless Death—Physical Death and Spiritual Death.

THE great apostle to the Gentiles declared, “When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.”—-Romans, 5v. 10. The two following passages are found in one of the epistles of the beloved disciple: “ Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us.”—-l John, 3iii. 16. “ In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”—-l John, 4iv. 9, 10. We have presented these two passages from 1 John in the order in which they stand in the epistle, but shall, nevertheless, consider the last first.

Who was the “propitiation for our sins?” He, was the “only begotten Son” of the Father ; he was the Son, whom the Father “ sent” “ into the world.” It was not the human son of the Virgin. That, terrestrial son—-that son by adoption—-was not the "only begotten Son” of the Father. Nor was he begotten of the Father at all; the conception of the Virgin was by the power of the Holy Ghost.—-Luke, 1i. 35. The human son of Mary was not “ sent” “ into the world ;” it was in the world that he was created “and born. “ “The propitiation for our sins,” then, was no less a being than the second person of the Trinity.

How did the second person of the Trinity become “the propitiation for our sins ?” The beloved disciple himself informs us, in the first of the passages transcribed from his epistle. The second person of the Trinity became “the propitiation for our sins” when, clothed in flesh, “he laid down his life for us.” The term “death,” in the passage from Romans, means the same as the terms “,he laid down his” life for us,” in the passage from I John. In both passages the Sufferer is the same, though he is called “God” in one of the passages, and “his Son” in the other. Each passage plainly points to the second person of the Trinity, and each passage virtually declares that, made incarnate, he died for our redemption. Of the same import is the following passage: “,And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faithli of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.”—- Galatians, 2ii. 20. The terms “and gave himself for me” are synonymous with the term “death” and the terms “he laid down his life for us,” found in the preceding passages. Nor is the following passage of less decisive bearing: “ Who, being the brightness of his” (God’s”s) “ glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the majesty on high.”—-Hebrews, 1i. 3. We learn elsewhere in Scripture that the purging of our sins was effected by the blood of God.—-Acts, 20xx. 28.

A passage that we have already partly transcribed in another connexion is too important in its influence on the present point to be omitted here. “ Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus; who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but emptied himself, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name; that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”—-Philippians, 2ii. 5-12. The reader will perceive that we have restored to this passage the terms “ emptied himself,” unjustly subtracted by the translators. Who was it that, “ being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God?” It was certainly the second person of the Trinity. Who was it that “ emptied himself" of the glory and beatitude of his Godhead? Beyond peradventure, the second person of the Trinity. Who was it that “took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men?” Verily, the second person of the Trinity. Who was it that “,humbled himself?” Not the lowly son of the lowly Virgin. No earth-born creature would have “,humbled himself” by an everlasting alliance with his own kindred, in-dwelling God, to be consummated with a seat at the right hand of the Highest. Who was it that “became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross?” With no less certainty, it was still the second person of the Trinity. In each stage of the mighty action the second person of the Sacred Three was, in his own ethereal essence, the paramount Actor. He was as much the paramount Actor in the article of death as he was the paramount Actor in the article of incarnation. That theory which, down to the dying scene, would leave the God the Actor, and, at that trying moment, suddenly withdraw the God, and substitute the man alone, is surely “of the earth, earthy.”

The great mediatorial death is called in Scripture “the death of the cross,”—-not that the divine essence, or even Christ’s”s human soul, absorbed as it was in its overpowering reflections, felt the wood or the irons of the flesh-torturing tree. Material wood and iron have not power over the rapt spirit. If the expiatory death was but the “death of the cross” in the literal import of the words, then bodily pain was the sole price of redemption. Such literal construction would exclude Christ's spiritual agonies, divine and human, not caused byi-iot caused by wood or irons, and yet constituting the infinite element in the atoning sacrifice. The terms “ the death of the cross,” when applied by the Holy Ghost to the passion of the incarnate Deity, swell beyond their lexicographic meaning as far as the “distance from the manger cradle to the eternal throne. The lowly terms, when thus infinitely expanded, represent not only the pains, corporeal and mental, of Mary’s”s human son, but the descent, and incarnation, and self-immolation of Him who said “Let there be light, and there was light.”

To evade the seemingly resistless force of the passage from Philippians, it has been contended that the exaltation of Christ, announced towards the end of the passage, was but the exaltation of his manhood alone; and that, as his divinity shared not in the exaltation, so his divinity participated not in the antecedent suffering. The celebrated commentator Whitby affirms that this was the doctrine of the fathers.* The school of Athanasius were wise in thus attempting to maintain their consistency. The component parts of their system would have been in chaotic hostility with each other, if, while they maintained that the humanity of Christ alone suffered, they had allowed that both his natures were the recipients of his exaltation. The exaltation was the reward of the suffering. The suffering and its reward were inseparable. The affirmation that the divinity of Christ shared in the exaltation would have drawn after it the affirmation that the divinity of Christ must have participated in the suffering. The doctrine that it was the man, and not the God, who was exalted, would appear, therefore, to be a necessary element of the prevalent theory.

* Whitby’ls Notes on Philippians, 2ii. 9.

136 EXALTATION OF CTIRIST.

wood or irons, and yet constituting the infinite element in the atoning sacrifice. The terms " the death of the cross," when applied by the Holy Ghost to the passion of the incarnate Deity, swell beyond their lexicographic meaning as far as the “distance from the manger cradle to the eternal throne. The lowly terms, when thus infinitely expanded, represent not only the pains, corporeal and mental, of Mary”s human son, but the descent, and incarnation, and self-immolation of Him who said Let there be light, and there was light."

To evade the seemingly resistless force of the passage from Philippians, it has been contended that the exaltation of Christ, announced towards the end of the passage, was but the exaltation of his manhood alone; and that, as his divinity shared not in the exaltation, so his divinity participated not in the antecedent suffering. The celebrated commentator Whitby affirms that this was the doctrine of the fathers.* The school of Athanasius were wise in thus attempting to maintain their consistency. The component parts of their system would have been in chaotic hostility with each other, if, while they maintained that the humanity of Christ alone suffered, they had allowed that both his natures were the recipients of his exaltation. The exaltation was the reward of the suffering. The suffering and its reward were inseparable. The affirmation that the divinity of Christ shared in the exaltation would have drawn after it the at- firmatioii that the divinity of Christ must have

* Whitbyls Notes on Philippians, ii. 9. EXALTATION OF CIIRIST. 137

participated in the suffering. The doctrine that it was the man, and @ not the God, who was exalted, would appear, therefore, to be a necessary element of the prevalent theory.

Yet this doctrine is not taught by the Bible. The very passage from Philippians announced that the subject of the exaltation was Christ Jesus; that the name at which every knee was to bow was the name of Jesus. Christ Jesus and Jesus are here synonymes, designating the same august Being. That august Being united the God and the man. The exaltation of Christ Jesus was the exaltation of both his natures. The exaltation of his manhood alone would have implied a severance of natures, made one and indivisible for eternity. The name at which every knee should bow comprehended the God. To the in-dwelling God belonged the infinite share of the homage of the universe. If the man could have been severed from the God, the man could not have been the object of heaven’s”s worship. The cherubim and the seraphim would not have been taught to bow the knee to him. “ Worshi@p God” is engraved on the pillars, and the walls, and the very pavements of heaven. It was the in-dwelling God that was to gather the bending knees around the name of Jesus.

Let it not be said that the Creator of the worlds already stood at the very pinnacle of exaltation, and therefore lacked capacity to be exalted farther. This imputed incapacity of God the Son to be exalted is german to his alleged incapacity to suffer. Both incapacities are the creations of theoretic 12*138 r.XALrATION OF TRINITY.

man. They pertain not to his divinity. That earnest prayer by the second person of the Trinity while incarnate on earth, “And now, Father, glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was,” breathed forth its aspirations after that very exaltation with which he was greeted on his return to his native heavens.—-John, 17xvii. 5.

The imagination that the persons of the Godhead could not have been exalted by the consummation of the work of redemption, is but the microscopic view of human reason. The whole Godhead were ineffably exalted. The Son was exalted. The Holy Ghost was exalted. The ]Father was exalted. The very passage from Philippians announced that the confession of every tongue to the supremacy of Jesus Christ should be “ to the glory of God the Father.” “ Glory to God in the highest,” was the opening of the anthem of praise by the choir of angels who had descended on the plains of Bethlehem to celebrate the birth of the infant Messiah.—-Luke, 2ii. 14. “,Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb forever,” was the “new song” of heaven to magnify the riches of redeeming love.—-Revelation, 5v. 9, 13.

On the triumphal return of the second person of. the Trinity from his terrestrial pilgrimage, a new name was given him. He had borne in heaven the name of the Son. He had received on earth the appellation of the Christ. On his ascension, he was greeted at the gates of paradise as THE SAVIOURlt OF THE WORLD. This was doubtless the “ name which is above every name.” The appellation of Creator he had acquired by the word of his power. This new name was consecrated in the baptism of his blood. At this name, every knee in heaven delights to bow. At this name, every knee in hell shall be constrained to bow. At this name, it is passing strange that every knee on the redeemed earth does not joyously bow!

But it is time that we should return from this unavoidable digression to the scriptural representation of the death of the uncreated Son. In this connexion, the following passage must not be omitted: “ Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.”—-Matthew, 20xx. 28. Who was the Son of man? He himself tells us in another of his evangelists, “,And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.” —-John, 3iii. 13. This was the Son of man, who gave “ his life a ransom for many.” What life did he give as the priceless “,ransom ?” He gave that life “ “which came down from heaven.” He gave that life which fills immensity. He gave that life which lived at once in heaven and on the earth. If farther scriptural proof is needed that the second perilson of the Trinity made incarnate, died “ to be the propitiation for our siniis,” we invoke once more his own sublime proclamation to his beloved disciple 140at Patmos, “ I am he that liveth, and was dead;-. and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen.”—-Revelation, 1i. 18.

It is, then, a recorded Bible representation, that the second person of the Trinity, clothed in flesh, died for our redemption. This representation, in every jot and tittle of its solemn import, must forever stand, though “ heaven and earth pass away.” That it is mysterious, and beyond the comprehension of human reason, is no ground for its rejection. If human reason can, at its discretion, discard every truth it does not understand, it might, by the word of its power, convert the universe into an infinite blank; for reasoning pride cannot comprehend even itself. It is enough that the death of the second person of the Trinity, to save our sinking world, is registered in the Word of God. From its sacred repository it must not be plucked by ruthless force ; nor must it be extracted by the chemical process of artificial interpretation.

How are we to understand the declarations of Scripture, that the second, the incarnate person of the Trinity died for our redemption ? Human reason has its ready response. The prevalent theory would boldly affirm that he died in no other sense than by the severance of the material and immaterial parts of his manhood; that it was the redeeming man who was “ wounded for our transgressions,” and with whose “ stripes we are healed;” that the redeeming God remained wrapped ,in the mantle of his impassibility ; that he continued as blessed on earth as he had ever been in heaven; that his infinite beatitude was as perfect in the most trying scene of the work of redemption as it had been in the crowning scene of the work of creation.

With profound respect, yet with propounder solemnity, must we enter our humble protest against a theory which would impute to the reiterated declarations of the Word of God an illusory meaning. The Bible could no more equivocate than its divine Author could swerve from the truth. It is the very soul of ingenuous frankness. It has no covert meanings; no deceptive reservations. When it declared that the incarnate person of the Trinity had died, it intended what was fully equivalent to all that its words import; it meant not that he died by fiA Action of law; -it meant not that he died at e le in th e covering of his manhood alone; it meant not that he died merely in the death of that terrestrial worm which he had condescendingly taken into holy alliance with himself. The scriptural declarations of the death of the second person of the Trinity had a meaning real as the truth of God, high as heaven, deep as the foundations of the everlasting throne. They intended that hiMs eternal essence, clothed in flesh, participated in the dying agonies which wrought salvation.

In this vital point, it is important that we should not be misunderstood. We will endeavour to define the position assumed by our argument so far as our finite and very limited capacity can grasp the mysteriousness and infinitude of the awful subject. It would be equally opposed to our head and to our heart to affirm that the Bible, in predi142 ETERNAL SON NEVER CEASED TO BE.

ceating death of the uncreated Son of God, intended to intimate that there has ever been a moment, in the flight of eternal ages, when the seconi-id person of the Trinity ceased to be. According to Scripture, the death of a spirit causes no cessation of its vitality. The ethereal vigour even of the human soul is not palsied by the cold touch of physical, nor is it to be coniasumed by the fervent heat of spiritual death. When the second person of ,the

Trinity “ laid down his life for us” as “the propitiaration for our sins,” he was as much the@ ever-livIting God as when he breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of our primeval ancestor.

The second person of the Trinity atoned, by suffering in his ethereal essence, for the sins of the world. He suffered, perhaps, as much as the redeemed would, but for him, have aggregately suffered through an endless eternity. His expiatory agonies were, doubtless, beyond the conception of mortal man; probably beyond the comprehension of the highest archangel. T“rhey could not be bodied forth, with distinctness, in words to be found in any human vocabulary, nor, probably, in the vocabulary of heaven; yet spiritual things, inexpressible and incomprehensible, are often obscurely unveiled to the imagination of man by the revelation of God. So it is with the secrets of “that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns.” So it is with the propounder secrets of that pavilion of wo, where He who inspired Isaiah’s”s harp “ was wounded for our transgressions” and “ bruised for our iniquities.” Mindful of the imperfections of human speech, and the dimness of human conception, the Bible, to impar;?,rt to redeemed creatures some twilight glimpses of” the redeeming agonies of their Creator, has selected the most potent term known to the dwellers upon the earth; a term appalling to the imagination and affecting to the heart; a term rendered more expressive and impressive by its very obscurity and incomprehensiveness. That term is death ! the vague, shadowy, and awful name of the king of terrors.

The Holy Ghost, who knows all things, well knew that this mighty term, and its no less mighty synonymes, were more calculated to intimate to mortal apprehension the viewless, nameless, inconceivable sufferings of the Redeemer of the world, than any other terms which humanman ears could hear and live. The name of the king of terrors must have been selected, not only for its transcendent potency, but for the affinity between the spiritual or second death which awaited the redeemed and the vicarious agonies borne for them by their ,great Redeemer. -Eternal, death awaited them. tl- -Death was the name of the penalty of their transgressrAnse4ions. Their Redeemer took on himself the penalty. The name wen@t along with it, as the shadow follows the substance. The term, death or either of its synonymes, then, when applied4-, iin Scripture to the second person of the Trintity, ”meant not to intimate the cessation of his existence, even for a moment.

It meant to shadow forth to the imagination, and impress on the heart, the image of those vicarious 144 ATONING DEATH BFGUN NOT ON CROSS.

sufferings, equivalent, in the estimate of sovereign grace, to the eternal death of the redeemed, which the uncreated Son endured for their redemption.

The Bible has given a mysterious prominence to the death of Christ, representing it as the vital element of the mediatorial sacrifice. We have seen that the blood of Christ, according to its scriptural import, means the totality of the merits of his expiatory sufferings. The body of @Christ has the same comprehensiveness of signi4@fication. When, at his sacramental -supper, our Lord distributed among his disciples the symbolical bread and wine, and called them his body and his blood, they typified and represented, not merely his physical body and blood, but the whole infinitude of his mediatorial merits. The death of Christ, in its scriptural import, has the same vast amplitude of signification. It was not confined to his - expiration on the cross. The media-heine4@torial death, which wrought the salvation @of t,ihe@ world4, began when; the second person of the Trinity “emptied himself” of the glory and beatitude of his Godhead. It descended with him to the manger of Bethlehem. - It followed him to the workshop of Joseph. It clung with a vulture’s”s grasp to the bosom of the houseless God, through his terrestrial pilgrimage. It included the totality of his expiatory humiliation and sufferings. Calvary witnessed its consummation, not its inception.

To limit the redeeming death of the Bible to the visible expiration between the two thieves I would, by narrowing the extent and depreciating the value ATONING DEATH: WHAT. 145

of the atoning offering, lower the awful standard of divine justice, and thus dim one of the brightest gems of the celestial diadem. Terrible indeed was the consummation of the atoning death. It was the outpouring of the full cup of God’s”s wrath. Awful beyond what creatures on earth, or, probably, creatures in heaven, can express or conceive, was the concluding scene of the expiatory tragedy. We would not underrate its transcendent value. Without it, not a soul could have been saved. Without it, the smoke of the torment of the redeemed must have ascended up forever and ever. The tremendous consummation on Calvary, however, consisted not chiefly in the physical death of Christ.L “That was but its finite element. His physical deathl7. was” but the demolition of “the temple ”of his body,” "“ that- it might be reared again more gloriously on the third day. The astonished centurion apprehended not that secret, yet almighty cause which darkened the sun, rent the rocks, and convulsed the earth.

But the viewless recess, in which were -consummated, the sufferings of the Prince of life in his ethereal essence, witnessed throes and spasms sufficient to have dissolved the material universe, had it not been upheld by the power-.bev

@,@4@@by the power of its agonized

Creator”. The rre6, where,@e the sword of the ,.Lord of

I-. Hlosts inflicted on Godaod the Son “ the chastisementchastisement of our peace,” was the scene of that concentration and sublimation of unearthly agonies which Inspiration could but faintly intimate to our mental 146 ATONING DEATH: WHAT.

vision even byv the vague, and shadowy, and appalling figure of the king of terrors.

That the term death, when applied to represent the expiatory sufferings, was satisfied by the physical expiration on Calvary, is a theory opposed to the letter and spirit of Scripture. There were sufferings behind the veil which shut out mortal vision, unseen and nameless. Those sufferings formed the true consummation of the mediatorial death of the Bible. Of that death of deaths; the visible extinction of l,,Iife on Calvary was but the shadow. The physical expiration on Calvary was the death of the redeeming man. The expiatory sufferings of the redeeming God, included, too, under the awful name of the king of terrors, and constituting the infinite portion of the redeeming sacrifice, were viewless—-unseen by mortals, perhaps seen only by the Sacred Three. , . The ”strong, yet seemingly unsatisfied desire of angels to look@A into them intimates that they were not open, palpa ble, and familiarx to the angelic vision.a;

There is a physical death, and there is a spiritual death, sometimes called, in Scripture-, the second death. There is a death for mortals to die, and a death of which immortals are capable of dying. When Christ said, “ If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death;” and again, when he sabid, “And whosoever liveth, and believeth in me, shall never die;” he did not -mean to exempt from physical death him who beliem e-ved in - iri him and kept his saying,— John, 8viii, 51xi; 11.. 26. @”He left physical death as he found it, the common inheritance of humanity. It was from spiritual death only that our Lord promised to protect those who yielded him their belief and their obedience. When Paul declared that Christ had “abolished death,” he spoke only of the death of the redeemed soul.—-2 Timothy, 1i. 10.

It was, then, to save us, not from physical, but from spiritual death; not from the death of time, but from the death of eternity, that the second person of the Trinity, clothed in flesh, “ laid down his life.” All the redeemed of every nation, and clime, and age, were destined to the relentless grasp of this undying death. They owed it an amount which human arithmetic has not powers to compute. Payment to the uttermost farthing in the sufferings of the transgressors—-sufferings as ceaseless as the flow of eternity—-was to be exacted. Then appeared, as their Redeemer, the second person of the glorious Trinity, clothed in the weeds of humanity. He came not to cancel or to mi-nitigate their debts without rendering what the eternal Father might deem a full equivalent; for that would have been to make infinite justice weakly break its sword. His mediatorial mission had for its object the substitution of his sufferings for theirs. For their spiritual death was interposed what the Bible calls his own death. His sufferings had the same awful name which would have attached to their sufferings. Nothing short of this infinite sacrifice could have satisfied the high, and inflexible requisitions of infinite justice. The redeeming equivalent was death for death; the death of the God for the undying death of his redeemed.

This was what was meant by the Holy Ghost, speaking by the tongue of his rapt apostle, when he said “ that he” (Jesus), “ by the grace of God, should taste of death for every man.”—-Hebrews, 2ii. 9. It was not the taste of physical death that was intended. Every man had drunk, or was to drink, of that bitter draught for himself. From the general doom pronounced on our first parents and their descendants, “ Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” the flight of six thousand years has afforded but two exceptions.OD.S. Of physical death, the terrestrial son of Mary, from the laws of his human nature, must have tasted for himself in his own person, unless he had, like Enoch and Elijah, been miraculously translated. The redeeming death, then, to be tasted, was not physical death, but an equivalent for the undying deat@h to which the redeemed themselves stood exposed.

What composed the cup of suffering, in Scripture denominated death, of which the eternal Son, clothed in flesh, tasted for every man, we know not distinctly, except that it was filled to its very brim with the wrath of almighty God against sin. The human son of the Virgin could no more, at least within the brief space of mortal life, have drank this cup than he could have quaffed an ocean of liquid fire. But the second person of the Trinity, in the omnipotence of hiMs might and the infinitude of his pitying grace, drained it, as the substitute of sinners, to its very dregs. It was a real, not a fictitious or seeming draining of the cup of divine wrath by the redeeming Son. No wonder that, at the unimaginable agonies of its Creator, the sun hid its face in darkness; that the rocks were rent asunder; that the earth shook to its foundations; that the repose of the dead was disturbed. This, doubtless, was the mystery of mysteries—-new and “strange” in the history of the universe—-which riveted the holy curiosity of heaven—.-into which “the angels desired to look.” —-1 Peter, 1. 12.